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Lyle Tiberius Rourke
Commander Lyle Tiberius Rourke is the main antagonist of Disney's 2001 animated feature film Atlantis: The Lost '' ''Empire. Prior to the main events of the film, he was the Commander of a previous mission to Iceland where he assisted Milo Thatch's grandfather, Thaddeus, in locating the Shepherd's Journal. Background Lyle T. Rourke was born in 1860 and learned the ways of military life at an early age. In 1864, his father, a cavalry officer named Lt. Col. Jackson, was killed in battle during the Civil War. After repeated expulsions from boarding school for fighting, Rourke resolved to follow in his father's footsteps and joined the military at age fifteen. There, he exhibited a remarkable talent for leadership, owing to his analytical mind, charisma, and refusal to acknowledge the white flag surrender. He married in June 1887, but his wife left him after only four months. He held numerous expeditions during his career, most notably leading the Whitmore Expedition to Atlantis. Personality Rourke is seemingly composed, pragmatic, and a reasonable figure of authority. In truth, he was extremely manipulative, scheming, cruel, and violent, having no qualms against harming or threatening others to get what he wanted, as he planned to steal of Heart of Atlantis to sell for a high price and didn't even care if the care if the Atlanteans would die as a result. According to Rourke, he also has quite a bit of control over his temper, as he tells Milo and congratulates Milo for setting it off. Due to being expelled from boarding school numerous times at the age of 15, he possesses a strong sense of anti-intellectualism as he believed that intellectualism prevented people from 'playing dirty' in order to become successful in life. Trivia * Rourke's fight with Milo was similar to the fight between Gaston and the Beast, even having Rourke trying to smash an ax against him. Coincidentally, both Beauty and the Beast and Atlantis: The Lost Empire were directed by the same two men (Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale) and were released within roughly a decade of each other. * Rourke's treachery and eventual betrayal was actually foreshadowed several times early in the film. ** When Whitmore shows Milo the photographs of all of the explorers he will be traveling to Atlantis with, Rourke's photo is the only photo that's partially obscured with only half of his face visible. Also, along with their photos are small sheets of paper showing each of the explorers' profiles and biographies. Since we don't see the other half of Rourke's face, we don't see his biography at all, implying that he's deceitful in nature. ** Yet another clue to Rourke's betrayal includes some of his early lines in the film, especially those containing either the words "rich" and/or "money", with the most obvious example of this being his line, "This will be an en''rich''ing for all of us." ** Also, shortly before Ulysses was submerging, Whitmore is seen crossing his fingers on his back, implying that he did not take full trust on the expedition led by Rourke. ** Also, when the remaining crew members are forced to evacuate the submarine, Rourke is the first to enter the escape pods. In real life, the captain is always the last crew member to evacuate a sinking ship (hence the phrase "go down with the ship"), so this is often considered disrespectful to maritime culture. ** When the crew is allowed to enter the city, Rourke orders his soldiers to stay behind at the volcano base, and "salvage what they can", which hints that he's covering up a secret agenda of his own. ** When Helga informs Rourke that there was not supposed to be people in Atlantis and that it changes everything, a determined Rourke replies "this changes nothing", implying that he does not care of whatever fate he brings to the Atlanteans. This sentence, however, is disrespectful against professional ethics and morality in real life as it emphasizes pure ignorance on the needs of others. * After Rourke abandons all of his teammates except for Helga along with Milo and the other Atlanteans in Atlantis, as he and Helga are leaving Atlantis with the crystallized Kida, he tells himself, "P.T. Barnum was right." P.T. Barnum was a famous American showman who coined the phrase, "there's a sucker born every minute." But historically, he never did as Barnum was not the kind to disparage his customers. * Rourke's middle name, Tiberius, could be a possible reference to Captain James Tiberius Kirk from the show Star Trek, of which Kashekim Nedakh's voice actor Leonard Nimoy played Spock. * Rourke has at least 90 henchmen (including himself and Helga), given the fact that the Ulysses was supposed to have 200 crew members at the start of the expedition, and that half (100) of said crew were all killed in the Leviathan attack, and that only seven crew members (Milo, Vinny, Molière, Audrey, Dr. Sweet, Mrs. Packard, and Cookie) actually survive at the end. * For a while, Rourke (and to a much lesser extent, Helga), was the most marketed character from the film following Atlantis' release and was therefore officially the most popular character from that film. However, Rourke's popularity may only be due to the fact that he is the villain. * Before James Garner was cast as Rourke, other actors considered for the role included Tommy Lee Jones, Jack Davenport, and Kurt Russell. * On one of the earlier versions of the script, during the final battle, when Rourke uses the fire axe in order to kill Milo and accidentally breaks the glass window from the steel container where Kida is, instead of trying to swing the axe once more against him, Rourke would have pulled out a revolver and try to shoot Milo on the head, upon which Milo would have shoved the piece of the crystallized glass in the revolver's barrel, making the firearm explode and backfire. The shards created by the explosion would have hit Rourke in the eyes, rendering him blind and prompting him to fall from the balloon to his death. The writers decided to rewrite the scene, as they thought it was too similar to Helga's death. * Rourke is the eigth male Disney Princess villain, after Gaston, Jafar, Governor Ratcliffe, Claude Frollo, Hades, Shan Yu, and Clayton, but before Doctor Facilier, Mor'du, King Candy, Hans and Tamatoa. * Rourke is the second Disney Villain to have one part of a book that the hero has, and the part the villain have has something important and use it for their own nefarious plans, Rourke has a page of the Shepherd's Journal from Milo Thatch which contains information about the Heart of Atlantis, the first is The Bookman from Bedknobs and Broomsticks has the part of The Spells of Astoroth from Miss Eglantine Pricefor the Substitutiary Locomotion spell and the third is Mittington Random in the Phineas and Ferb episode "The Klimpaloon Ultimatum" having the second journal of the Klimpaloon from Phineas and Ferb which contains the map to Klimpaloon. * Like Wilhelmina Packard, Milo Thatch, and Kida, Rourke has his only appearance in House of Mouse. Strangely enough, he, for some reason, does not appear in the show's tie-in film Mickey's House of Villains, not even as a cameo, and is, therefore, one of the very few Disney villains featured on that show that doesn't appear in that film at all. * During his final moments, Eddie Carr's scream during the latter's final moments in The Lost World: Jurassic Park is used twice, during Rourke's crystallization as he screams in pain and when he screams in fright before he is blasted to pieces by the propellers of the burning Gyro-Evac. * Rourke's scoffing of Milo's objections against taking the Heart as pure rigid academics is rather true in real life: it is no good to be successful only at education institutions (such as achieving a CGPA of 4.0) if a person is not good at internships or has failed to secure a lifetime career. It is better to have a better working experience than to perform better academically. 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